Some Careers Are Better to Do Young

Some careers are better to do when you’re young. Athletics is the most obvious example that springs to mind.

There are others. Compare my two main career interests: entrepreneurship/starting companies and writing/journalism. The start-up tech world seems to discriminate in favor of youth. That is, you don’t see many 65 year-olds starting tech companies.

The writing world, however, seems age-agnostic or maybe even the opposite. There are many older writers who are still widely respected and prolific. More experience as a writer is almost always considered a plus, whereas in the start-up world too much experience can be seen as a negative.

Note that I’m talking specifically about the start-up tech world. Daniel Gross has a recent Slate piece titled How did America’s business leaders get so old? where he discusses Buffett, Icahn, Soros, and other senior citizens who still dominate business.

All this to say, it seems to make more sense to start start-ups while I’m young, and pursue writing full-time later in life.

Your rule of 27 for starting businesses seems to have an interesting parallel in fiction writing. That is, with some exceptions, the youngest age that you see writers write important novels is around 27 (Chabon, Eggers, etc…) It seems, it takes about that many years to get good, but, it’s still young enough to be original.

What could undo the young writers? We can’t live without Google. The staccato recall of silicon memory enabled by powerful algorithms of search engines have not just supplied us with the stuff of thought, but has also shaped our process of thought, chipping away our ability to concentrate and contemplate. The one that could’ve been a scuba diver in the sea of words now makes do with zipping along the surface on a jet ski.

And the older ones have a distinct advantage here, assuming that they haven’t been touched so much by the spell of Google. Left to harp on their faculties of absorbing long reads and frequent jogging of their deep set memories to retrieve information, they resurrect the hopes of leaving behind some fertile literary material for motivating the posterity to read; and by a rare stroke of luck, stimulating a few of them to write as well.